Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | An interesting variant on expected patterns of language acquisition is the case of the medieval visionary writer Hildegard von Bingen, who acquired Latin, the international language of her day, without any formal instruction in it whatsoever. In fact, unlike most modern instances of language acquisition, she was expressly excluded from any form of deliberate, conscious learning. As a woman and nun in the twelfth century, Hildegard was denied all possibility of a grammatical education (the first part of the then curriculum) other than learning to read, yet she seems to have acquired Latin by hearing it read, sung and expounded in church and cloister, and by visualising it in her mind as though it was written down in a kind of phonetic script. © 1993. |
